No, thinking that someone of a particular race is inferior or superior is racist. Being fine with people of a particular race being denied equal rights isn’t necessarily.
Do you have some sort of cite to indicate that Byrd was secretly in favor of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and was 100% certain it would pass no matter what he did? Because if you don’t, it strikes me as too unlikely to be worth considering.
*A person who’s pretending to be racist, as distasteful as that is, might in some cases be the lesser of two evils. I can imagine situations where an actual racist would be the lesser of two evils too – if a mere segregationist were running against someone who was pushing to bring back slavery then the segregationist would look pretty good by comparison. Heck, if we’re just making things up then why not have the pro-slavery guy running against an evil madman who wants to blow up the entire planet?
In real life we are rarely limited to just two choices though, and none of this has much to do with the OP’s question, which I find more interesting than your hypothetical. The OP asks whether there’s any moral difference between a politician who is actually racist and supports a racist agenda and one who isn’t genuinely racist but pretends he is and supports a racist agenda because it is politically expedient. And my answer to that question is still no, there is little moral difference between the two. If they’re supporting the same agenda then there is no difference with regard to the harm they’re doing to others, and the man who keeps doing something he knows is wrong is arguably the worse human being.
Except that we’re not just making things up. A lot of old-time Southern Democrats, while regressive on racial matters, were quite progressive in other areas. George Wallace is a good example. Though a vocal segregationist, he was a progressive populist on other issues.
The political battles in the South at that time occurred in Democratic primaries. (Republicans were irrelevant, since they never got elected.) Often the Democratic primary would pit two opponents who would try to outdo each other in support of segregation, but who on other issues were widely divergent, with one being across-the-board conservative and the other being an old-school southern populist with political roots going back to the People’s Party.
Have you ever read Kurt Vonnegut’s book Mother Night or seen the (pretty faithful and generally well done) movie? If not, the main character- who was a minor character in Slaughterhouse 5, is Howard W. Campbell, Jr., and American who grows up in Germany and becomes a playwright and radio personality at the time of the Nazi takeover. He is not a Nazi, but he does remain in Germany after the war breaks out (among other reasons he is married to a German actress) and he is enlisted to help the Americans transmit coded messages in his propaganda broadcast. To remain on the air and in favor with the Nazis he becomes the most virulent anti-semitic and pro Hitler voice in Germany, beginning his broadcasts by referring to himself as “the last free American”, calling for the U.S. to overthrow “Franklin Delano Rosenfeld” and join with the Nazis, and of course in the process he becomes a wanted war criminal, the only acknowledgment or reward he receives for his service is that he is saved from hanging and allowed to go free, and he shocks most by living under his own name in NYC after the war. This being Vonnegut he of course gets into an increasingly complex and absurd mishmash involving Soviet spies, Holocaust survivors, an odd trio of neo-Nazis (one a dentist, one black, and one a defrocked priest), and others.
In any case, Vonnegut said that of all his novels this was the only one that he felt had a clear message, and it is this:
I think George Wallace is the perfect example. All who knew him well claim he wasn’t nearly as radical or as racist as his posturing- but did it make the girls in Birmingham or others killed in the civil rights era when and where he was governor any less dead? Nope.
I don’t really see any great difference in pretense and reality when it comes to presentation of public figures.
Didn’t you tell me just a couple of posts back that you didn’t want to talk about Byrd but rather a hypothetical politician? Now all of a sudden you don’t want to talk about hypothetical politicians, you want to talk about George Wallace. Make up your mind.
You implied that the hypothetical had no basis in reality. You were wrong.
The ultimate irony would be if there were no actual racists in the old south - just a bunch of people who were all trying to fit in with what they thought their neighbours believed.
No, I didn’t. You inferred that, and you were wrong. What I was implying was that I did not care to play along as you introduced one hypothetical after another, especially since they were less interesting than the OP’s question. Sorry if that was unclear. I wasn’t trying to be subtle about it, that’s why I came right out and said “none of this has much to do with the OP’s question, which I find more interesting than your hypothetical.”
If you wanted to talk about George Wallace you could have said so in the first place rather than repeatedly (posts #38 and 40) insisting you were only speaking hypothetically and getting snippy with me for trying to bring things back to reality. Now you’re getting all snippy with me again for treating a scenario you explicitly described as a hypothetical like it was a hypothetical. Well, you can find someone else to play these weird little games with. I’m going to get back to the actual topic of this thread now.
While there were definitely hard-core racists around at the time, it is depressing to think about how many people must have been more or less “good men who did nothing”. This isn’t to say that the Average Joe then wasn’t racist at all, but that many were probably pretty casual about their racism and were to some extent just going with the flow. Others must have felt the current situation was at least somewhat wrong, but did not feel strongly enough to attempt to do anything about it. The same for Apartheid, the Holocaust, etc. all through history.
To tie this back directly to the OP’s question, what’s even worse than being a good (or at least not-that-bad) person who does nothing in the face of evil is being one who outright promotes evil. Although it’s not admirable behavior, it’s also not especially unusual for people to turn a blind eye towards injustice in their own society or to be unwilling to stick their necks out for others. It’s thankfully more rare for someone to be able to look at injustice, recognize that it is wrong, and then go on to not just passively accept this injustice but actively promote it in order to become more popular.
Going just from his Wikipedia article it sounds like this description doesn’t apply to Byrd. He apparently did not claim himself that he’d only feigned racism, but instead said he’d changed his views and that he regretted his past political actions. I hope for his sake that this was true. But if he was espousing racist beliefs he didn’t sincerely hold while using his power to advance a racist agenda then I think we’re in an “if it quacks like a duck” situation.
In order to be analogous, the Republican would have to have been a member of the Communist Party or something, so no, I don’t see the Dems getting quite so worked up.
I think the voluntary coming out versus unwilling exposure plays a role in my view of things, though I’m not sure it’s dispositive.
Speaking of coming out, is this much different from a closeted Republican politician verbally condemning homosexuality? From one voting to pass restrictive measures? Have many closeted Republicans (or other politicians with an anti-homosexual record/agenda) came out completely voluntarily? Have any Republicans been in a situation where previous strong rhetoric earned them electoral gains but their district/area changed such that expressing those views was no longer expedient? To the point where expressing support for gay rights was an electoral boon?
The parallels aren’t perfect, of course, but there seems to be strong overlap. I guess the strongest parallel would be one changing position but not sexual orientation. Does an example like that exist?
Oh, I used Republicans in here because homosexual hypocrisy seems much more associated with them. However, given that the Democratic party is (generally) more aligned with gay rights, perhaps it’s more likely that a previously anti-gay politician finding it expedient to say s/he was just joshin’ all along will be a Democrat.
I think this is different, because if we accept that one does not choose to be homosexual then a given politician could be homosexual despite sincerely believing that homosexuality is wrong. If this politician can manage to refrain from hooking up with other men then he’s not even really a hypocrite. If he can’t then he may consider himself akin to a drug addict who struggles and sometimes fails to control his own temptations but wants to save others from going down the same path.
A closer analogy would be a politician who openly opposed gay rights and voted against same sex marriage and laws that would prevent workplace discrimination…but secretly believed there was nothing wrong with homosexuality and that GLBT folk deserved to be protected against discrimination. He just didn’t care about this anywhere near as much as he cared about impressing his anti-gay constituents. He thus decided to pursue an anti-gay agenda he didn’t really believe in and oppose gay rights just to gain votes. I don’t know if there actually are any politicians like this, but I strongly suspect that a good number who’ve opposed gay rights don’t really feel that homosexuality is that big of a deal. It’s just convenient for them to throw gay rights under the bus. But if any of them later try to say “Oh, but I wasn’t really anti-gay because my heart wasn’t in it” then I’d consider this a distinction without a difference.
Thinking about this now, I’m not sure how I’d feel about a politician who was open about his personal beliefs but promised to promote the views of his constituents even if they were in conflict with his own. This does seem awfully close to an “I was just obeying orders” defense, but if the politician were willing to say something like “I personally oppose segregation, and I hope the day comes when the people in my state will come to feel the same way. But I am here to represent my constituents, and segregation is what they want. That therefore is the way I must vote” then that’s perhaps somewhat more moral than a politician who pretended to be all for segregation. The legal outcome would be the same though, and I don’t think this politician would be a particularly inspiring figure for those struggling to work up the nerve to support a cause they knew was right but that was also unpopular. So while I suppose it’s better to be honest but spineless than dishonest and spineless, it’s not as good as standing up and working for what you truly believe is right.